In recent years, large-scale auto-regressive models have made significant progress in various tasks, such as text or video generation. However, the environmental impact of these models has been largely overlooked, with a lack of assessment and analysis of their carbon footprint. To address this gap, we introduce OpenCarbonEval, a unified framework for integrating large-scale models across diverse modalities to predict carbon emissions, which could provide AI service providers and users with a means to estimate emissions beforehand and help mitigate the environmental pressure associated with these models. In OpenCarbonEval, we propose a dynamic throughput modeling approach that could capture workload and hardware fluctuations in the training process for more precise emissions estimates. Our evaluation results demonstrate that OpenCarbonEval can more accurately predict training emissions than previous methods, and can be seamlessly applied to different modal tasks. Specifically, we show that OpenCarbonEval achieves superior performance in predicting carbon emissions for both visual models and language models. By promoting sustainable AI development and deployment, OpenCarbonEval can help reduce the environmental impact of large-scale models and contribute to a more environmentally responsible future for the AI community.
Benefiting from the advancements in large language models and cross-modal alignment, existing multi-modal video understanding methods have achieved prominent performance in offline scenario. However, online video streams, as one of the most common media forms in the real world, have seldom received attention. Compared to offline videos, the 'dynamic' nature of online video streams poses challenges for the direct application of existing models and introduces new problems, such as the storage of extremely long-term information, interaction between continuous visual content and 'asynchronous' user questions. Therefore, in this paper we present Flash-VStream, a video-language model that simulates the memory mechanism of human. Our model is able to process extremely long video streams in real-time and respond to user queries simultaneously. Compared to existing models, Flash-VStream achieves significant reductions in inference latency and VRAM consumption, which is intimately related to performing understanding of online streaming video. In addition, given that existing video understanding benchmarks predominantly concentrate on offline scenario, we propose VStream-QA, a novel question answering benchmark specifically designed for online video streaming understanding. Comparisons with popular existing methods on the proposed benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method for such challenging setting. To verify the generalizability of our approach, we further evaluate it on existing video understanding benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline scenarios as well. All code, models, and datasets are available at the //invinciblewyq.github.io/vstream-page/
Motion-based controllable text-to-video generation involves motions to control the video generation. Previous methods typically require the training of models to encode motion cues or the fine-tuning of video diffusion models. However, these approaches often result in suboptimal motion generation when applied outside the trained domain. In this work, we propose MotionClone, a training-free framework that enables motion cloning from a reference video to control text-to-video generation. We employ temporal attention in video inversion to represent the motions in the reference video and introduce primary temporal-attention guidance to mitigate the influence of noisy or very subtle motions within the attention weights. Furthermore, to assist the generation model in synthesizing reasonable spatial relationships and enhance its prompt-following capability, we propose a location-aware semantic guidance mechanism that leverages the coarse location of the foreground from the reference video and original classifier-free guidance features to guide the video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionClone exhibits proficiency in both global camera motion and local object motion, with notable superiority in terms of motion fidelity, textual alignment, and temporal consistency.
As DeepFake video manipulation techniques escalate, posing profound threats, the urgent need to develop efficient detection strategies is underscored. However, one particular issue lies with facial images being mis-detected, often originating from degraded videos or adversarial attacks, leading to unexpected temporal artifacts that can undermine the efficacy of DeepFake video detection techniques. This paper introduces a novel method for robust DeepFake video detection, harnessing the power of the proposed Graph-Regularized Attentive Convolutional Entanglement (GRACE) based on the graph convolutional network with graph Laplacian to address the aforementioned challenges. First, conventional Convolution Neural Networks are deployed to perform spatiotemporal features for the entire video. Then, the spatial and temporal features are mutually entangled by constructing a graph with sparse constraint, enforcing essential features of valid face images in the noisy face sequences remaining, thus augmenting stability and performance for DeepFake video detection. Furthermore, the Graph Laplacian prior is proposed in the graph convolutional network to remove the noise pattern in the feature space to further improve the performance. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to illustrate that our proposed method delivers state-of-the-art performance in DeepFake video detection under noisy face sequences. The source code is available at //github.com/ming053l/GRACE.
Deep generative models like VAEs and diffusion models have advanced various generation tasks by leveraging latent variables to learn data distributions and generate high-quality samples. Despite the field of explainable AI making strides in interpreting machine learning models, understanding latent variables in generative models remains challenging. This paper introduces LatentExplainer, a framework for automatically generating semantically meaningful explanations of latent variables in deep generative models. LatentExplainer tackles three main challenges: inferring the meaning of latent variables, aligning explanations with inductive biases, and handling varying degrees of explainability. By perturbing latent variables and interpreting changes in generated data, the framework provides a systematic approach to understanding and controlling the data generation process, enhancing the transparency and interpretability of deep generative models. We evaluate our proposed method on several real-world and synthetic datasets, and the results demonstrate superior performance in generating high-quality explanations of latent variables.
Customized image generation, which seeks to synthesize images with consistent characters, holds significant relevance for applications such as storytelling, portrait generation, and character design. However, previous approaches have encountered challenges in preserving characters with high-fidelity consistency due to inadequate feature extraction and concept confusion of reference characters. Therefore, we propose Character-Adapter, a plug-and-play framework designed to generate images that preserve the details of reference characters, ensuring high-fidelity consistency. Character-Adapter employs prompt-guided segmentation to ensure fine-grained regional features of reference characters and dynamic region-level adapters to mitigate concept confusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of Character-Adapter. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that Character-Adapter achieves the state-of-the-art performance of consistent character generation, with an improvement of 24.8% compared with other methods. Our code will be released at //github.com/Character-Adapter/Character-Adapte
We introduce ReXTime, a benchmark designed to rigorously test AI models' ability to perform temporal reasoning within video events. Specifically, ReXTime focuses on reasoning across time, i.e. human-like understanding when the question and its corresponding answer occur in different video segments. This form of reasoning, requiring advanced understanding of cause-and-effect relationships across video segments, poses significant challenges to even the frontier multimodal large language models. To facilitate this evaluation, we develop an automated pipeline for generating temporal reasoning question-answer pairs, significantly reducing the need for labor-intensive manual annotations. Our benchmark includes 921 carefully vetted validation samples and 2,143 test samples, each manually curated for accuracy and relevance. Evaluation results show that while frontier large language models outperform academic models, they still lag behind human performance by a significant 14.3% accuracy gap. Additionally, our pipeline creates a training dataset of 9,695 machine generated samples without manual effort, which empirical studies suggest can enhance the across-time reasoning via fine-tuning.
Integrating visible and infrared images into one high-quality image, also known as visible and infrared image fusion, is a challenging yet critical task for many downstream vision tasks. Most existing works utilize pretrained deep neural networks or design sophisticated frameworks with strong priors for this task, which may be unsuitable or lack flexibility. This paper presents SimpleFusion, a simple yet effective framework for visible and infrared image fusion. Our framework follows the decompose-and-fusion paradigm, where the visible and the infrared images are decomposed into reflectance and illumination components via Retinex theory and followed by the fusion of these corresponding elements. The whole framework is designed with two plain convolutional neural networks without downsampling, which can perform image decomposition and fusion efficiently. Moreover, we introduce decomposition loss and a detail-to-semantic loss to preserve the complementary information between the two modalities for fusion. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging benchmarks, verifying the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-arts. Code is available at \href{//github.com/hxwxss/SimpleFusion-A-Simple-Fusion-Framework-for-Infrared-and-Visible-Images}{//github.com/hxwxss/SimpleFusion-A-Simple-Fusion-Framework-for-Infrared-and-Visible-Images}
The recent advancements in text-to-image generative models have been remarkable. Yet, the field suffers from a lack of evaluation metrics that accurately reflect the performance of these models, particularly lacking fine-grained metrics that can guide the optimization of the models. In this paper, we propose EvalAlign, a metric characterized by its accuracy, stability, and fine granularity. Our approach leverages the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pre-trained on extensive datasets. We develop evaluation protocols that focus on two key dimensions: image faithfulness and text-image alignment. Each protocol comprises a set of detailed, fine-grained instructions linked to specific scoring options, enabling precise manual scoring of the generated images. We Supervised Fine-Tune (SFT) the MLLM to align closely with human evaluative judgments, resulting in a robust evaluation model. Our comprehensive tests across 24 text-to-image generation models demonstrate that EvalAlign not only provides superior metric stability but also aligns more closely with human preferences than existing metrics, confirming its effectiveness and utility in model assessment.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Answering complex questions about images is an ambitious goal for machine intelligence, which requires a joint understanding of images, text, and commonsense knowledge, as well as a strong reasoning ability. Recently, multimodal Transformers have made great progress in the task of Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR), by jointly understanding visual objects and text tokens through layers of cross-modality attention. However, these approaches do not utilize the rich structure of the scene and the interactions between objects which are essential in answering complex commonsense questions. We propose a Scene Graph Enhanced Image-Text Learning (SGEITL) framework to incorporate visual scene graphs in commonsense reasoning. To exploit the scene graph structure, at the model structure level, we propose a multihop graph transformer for regularizing attention interaction among hops. As for pre-training, a scene-graph-aware pre-training method is proposed to leverage structure knowledge extracted in the visual scene graph. Moreover, we introduce a method to train and generate domain-relevant visual scene graphs using textual annotations in a weakly-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on VCR and other tasks show a significant performance boost compared with the state-of-the-art methods and prove the efficacy of each proposed component.